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Disney animators set pictures to classical music as Leopold Stokowski conducts the Philadelphia Orchestra. "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" features Mickey Mouse as an aspiring magician who oversteps his limits. "The Rite of Spring" tells the story of evolution, from single-celled animals to the death of the dinosaurs. "Dance of the Hours" is a comic ballet performed by ostriches, hippos, elephants and alligators. "Night on Bald Mountain" and "Ave Maria" set the forces of darkness and light against each other as a devilish revel is interrupted by the coming of a new day. (David Thiel)
An innovative and revolutionary animated classic from Walt Disney, combining classical music masterpieces with imaginative visuals, presented with Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra. The eight animation sequences are colorful, impressive, free-flowing, abstract, and often surrealistic pieces. They include the most famous of all, Paul Dukas' "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" with Mickey Mouse as the title character battling brooms carrying endless buckets of water. Also Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor," Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker Suite," dinosaurs and volcanoes in Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring," the delightful "Dance of the Hours" by Ponchielli with dancing hippos, crocodiles, ostriches, and elephants, and Mussorgsky's darkly apocalyptic "Night on Bald Mountain." (Tim Dirks)
It's hard to believe now that Walt Disney's bold 1940 impressionistic experiment in wedding then-state-of-the-art animation with classical music was a rather resounding failure upon its release. The cliché proves the rule: Fantasia was decades ahead of its time (Disney even launched a "psychedelic"-themed re-release campaign in the late 1960s). It's even harder to fathom that then-Disney management spent over a million dollars in the early '80s replacing the muscular Leopold Stokowski score with a digitally recorded clone, then another undisclosed fortune to digitize Leo and put him back alongside Mickey at the conductor's podium in the 1990s! This much-traveled Stokowski score will gain no points for subtlety (a symphonic Shaq attack is more like it), but it was Walt's first--and only!--choice and has never sounded better. (Jerry McCulley) |
